9
WORKING WOMEN DON’T get to scurry home and bury their faces in pillows when they’ve been yelled at. You settle your trembling hands by wrapping them around your tools and returning to work. Elisa had wanted to talk about what she’d seen and heard—the giant hand slapping the tank window, the animalistic roar. From Elisa’s first startled signs, though, it became clear that Zelda hadn’t seen the hand and had taken the roar for yet another distasteful animal experiment that would only sicken her to consider in detail. So Elisa keeps her thoughts to herself, wondering if it’s possible that Zelda is right and she mistook the whole thing.
The best thing for tonight is to scrub the images from her mind, and scrubbing is something Elisa is good at. She’s in and out of toilet stalls in the northeast men’s room, stabbing her swab under rims. Zelda, done mopping the floor, wets a pumice stone in the sink and frowns at the piss-crusted urinal partition she’s squared off against for years, searching for a fresh complaint to lift their spirits. Elisa believes in Zelda as she believes in few others: She will find that complaint, and it will be funny, and they will begin to crawl from under this sticky film of debasement left by all those judging men.
“Finest minds in the country, they tell us, gathered right here at Occam—and there are pee freckles on the ceiling. You know Brewster’s not the crispiest chip in the bag, but even he hits the target seventy-five percent of the time. I don’t know if I ought to be depressed about this or go get the Guinness Records folks on the line. Maybe they’ll give me a finder’s fee.”
Elisa nods and signs “Get on the telephone,” opting for an old-fashioned, two-piece model to evoke visions of a herd of New York City correspondents with PRESS badges tucked into their fedoras. Zelda gets the reference and grins—a bursting relief of a sight—and Elisa presses the joke, wiggling her fingers in the sign for “teletype,” then signing a suggestion to send a letter via pigeon. Zelda laughs and gestures at the ceiling.
“I can’t even figure out the angle of the—you know what I mean? I don’t want to be indecent here. But if you think about the physics and all that? The angle of the garden hose, the direction of the spray?”
Elisa giggles soundlessly, scandalized and so very grateful.
“Only thing I can figure is it’s a competition. Kind of like the Olympics? Points for height and distance. Points for style if you waggle it really good. And to think, all these years, we thought these science types didn’t have any physical skills.”
Elisa is in full silent guffaw, rocking back against the stall, the night’s events bleaching away under Zelda’s off-color scenario.
“Hey, there’s two urinals here,” Zelda chuckles. “I don’t think synchronized peeing is out of the question—”
A man walks in. Elisa turns from the toilet, Zelda from the urinal. He wasn’t there; now he is. It’s so incredible, the women forget to react. A plastic sign reading CLOSED FOR CLEANING is all that defends female janitors from the threat of male incursion, but it’s always been sufficient. Zelda starts to point at the sign, but her arm dies midway; it’s not a janitor’s place to assert the existence of physical objects to a man of higher station, and besides, her gibes about men’s bathroom practices are still ringing from every pipe, locknut, and escutcheon of the undersink. Elisa feels shame, then shame for feeling shame. Thousands of times she and Zelda have cleaned this room, and it takes one single man to make them feel like the obscene ones.
The man paces coolly to the middle of the room.
He holds in his right hand an orange cattle prod.
10
THE REVOLVING DOOR of Klein & Saunders works its sleight of hand. On the street side, among briefcasers juking toward their next meeting, Giles is adrift, ancient, useless. The rotating chamber is where the metamorphosis happens, the glass turnstile reflecting an infinitude of possible, better selves. When Giles is ejected onto the lobby’s chessboard marble, he’s a new man. Art in hand, and with a place to take it, he’s important.
It’s been like this since before he can recall, the producing of art a mere prelude to the delight of having it, a concrete object he’d willed into being. Everything else he has is like his derelict apartment—at the end of the day, only rented. The first objet d’art in his life was a human skull his father had won in a poker game, named Andrzej after the Pole from whom it’d been won. It was Giles’s first study; he drew it hundreds of times, on the sides of envelopes, atop newspaper faces, on the back of his hand.
How he got from sketches of skulls to working at Klein & Saunders twenty years later he can barely recall. His first job was at the same Hampden-Woodberry cotton mill as his father, habituating himself to the tickle of cotton fibers in his nose, the callouses wrought by pitching bales, the soft second skin of red clay anytime he ran cotton from Mississippi. At night, sometimes all night, he painted on discarded paper he plundered from work, rampageous portraitures that sustained him better than food, and make no mistake—he was plenty hungry. He used the Mississippi clay on his arms to make his oranges pop. Decades later, it would still be his secret.
In two years, he’d left behind both the mill and his confused father to take an art department job at Hutzler’s department store. A few years later, he moved to Klein & Saunders, and there spent most of his career. He’d been proud, but not satisfied. His nagging discontent had something to do with art. True art. He’d once defined himself by that word, hadn’t he? All those abstracts of Andrzej, all those male nudes wild-lined from cotton-bale callouses and blood-orange with Biloxi mud. Giles slowly came to feel that each false smile of joy he painted for Klein & Saunders vampired real joy from those who gauged their own happiness against advertising’s impossible standards. He knew the feeling. He felt it every day.
Klein & Saunders works with prestigious clients. Hence the waiting room stocked with cardinal-red chairs of au courant German design and the libations cart managed by Hazel, the redoubtable receptionist who outdates Giles. Today, though, Hazel is absent, and some ad man’s fawn-legged secretary has been tossed before a dozen impatient execs, a smile bolted to her fearful face. Giles watches her accidentally sever an incoming call while fretting over a tray of half-made drinks. He assesses the room’s mood by the cloud of cigarette smoke: not lounging like Michelangelo’s Adam, but scattered in locomotive puffs.
He forgives her for taking a minute to notice him.
“Mr. Giles Gunderson, artist,” he heralds. “I have a two-fifteen with Mr. Bernard Clay.”
She pushes a button and garbles his name into the receiver. Giles isn’t convinced the message has been transmitted but can’t bear to ask the poor thing to try again. Giles faces the throng. It’s incredible, he thinks, that twenty years later part of him still desires to run with this stalking, snarling pack.
He considers the secretary, the drink cart. He sighs and steps behind the latter, clapping his hands for attention.
“Good sirs,” he calls out. “What say this afternoon we mix our own drinks?”
They sputter at this interference into their rightful disgruntlement; each man hoists one eyebrow high onto his forehead. Giles knows this feeling, how pique slides toward suspicion. After all this time, he doesn’t know how people so quickly sniff out that’s he different. He thinks he can feel his toupee tape begin to rip free. Should this moment tip wrongly, his rug will be the least of his problems.